by P. D. Viner
“How can I help?” Tom asks.
“You seemed to know Dani.”
“A little. We’re in English Lit together.”
“Well, have you any idea where she might have gone? I was meant to be taking her home, at least I thought I was but …”
There was a party for the sporty and attractive kids, something Tom would never be invited to. He was about to tell her father the address but some alarm bell went off in his head.
“No. No, sorry, I don’t know where she is,” he lied.
“Okay.” They both just stand there. Tom feels his Zoom begin to drip. Finally the older man says, “Well, thanks.”
Jim Lancing walks off, a little unsure about where to go and what to do. Tom watches until he disappears. Then he picks up his case and heads toward Islington and the party. Obviously he wasn’t invited, but now he bears a message. That is his ticket to get in and get close to her. It’s slight, he knows that, but maybe it’s just enough to allow him entrance to the inner sanctum.
TWELVE
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Patty walks to the cafe, all the while feeling the pull of his blood. There is only one customer, a cab driver, sitting alone in the far corner. Patty looks him over. People-watching is still one of her favorite ways to pass the time and she can’t resist trying to unpick his life story. They make eye contact for a moment. He has a haunted look, like a man who is pushed or pushes himself very hard. Does he need the money to fund some addiction? Or does he just need to keep moving, keep awake like a shark, desperate just to keep going, no time to think? And what might he see in her—does she stink of desperation? Can he tell that she has lived and breathed revenge—has stayed alive for one purpose: to catch the man who took Dani’s life and pitched them all into this everlasting, ferocious winter of grief and loss?
From behind the counter a figure emerges. A bleary-eyed young man, dark and handsome.
“Tea, please.”
“Ereogo?”
“I don’t understand.”
He mimes, pointing at the seats or out the door.
“Oh, yes, of course. I …”
She would like to sit there and drink the hot tea, cradle the ceramic bowl in her hands and let the heat seep through into her icy fingers. But the blood is in the car and what if someone tries to steal it?
“Take-away, please.”
He takes a Styrofoam cup and fills it from the urn, then splashes a little milk into it before sealing it with a white plastic cap. Patty takes it from him with a mumble of thanks and drops two coins onto the counter. She turns on her heel and walks back to the door, immediately sorry for her decision to opt for take-away as the heat is dampened by the foam of the cup and her fingers stay cold. Outside, on the street, she pours some of the tea directly onto her skin and it turns a bright and angry red, but she can’t feel it.
Patty perches in the doorway of the lab, waiting for the staff to struggle in, the blood cradled in her arms. Her anxiety is building but she tries to keep it in check.
“Just wait,” she tells herself. And she can wait. She is the queen of waiting. It seems like all she has done for the longest time. Finally, her patience pays off. The first staff member arrives. He looks at her nervously.
“Can you stand back?” he asks.
“Oh, of course. Yes.”
Patty steps away from the stairs and the keypad. The staff member taps in his code and then edges in, keeping his eyes glued to Patty. It’s only once he’s inside that Patty realizes he thought she might try and force her way in to get drugs or start begging for something. When the next staff member arrives, Patty moves away and immediately launches into her best Hilary Clifton-Hastings, non-threatening cheery voice.
“Hello. Just waiting to have someone run some tests. That’s all.”
They look at her like she’s crazy. That may be better than fearing she’s an axe-wielding junkie.
Finally the door is open to the public and she can walk inside. Roberta is there, the woman she’d met with the week before. At that meeting, she had given Patty the slide and refrigerated box as well as instructions on how to take the sample. There were two options, she had said. The easiest was with a swab inside the cheeks, Invasive but did not hurt in any way. The other option was a blood sample—a prick was all that was needed. Patty had decided on blood, but a little more than just a prick. Patty hands her the box with the slide of blood. Roberta checks it is sealed correctly.
“Please take a seat.” She motions to two chairs in the corner and then she punches digits into a keypad and disappears into the main part of the lab. Patty can’t sit. She stands. After about twenty minutes Roberta returns.
“The sample is well collected and seems clean. It can be matched with the sample you brought in before. We will have the result tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry.” Patty tries to keep the scream out of her voice. “We had agreed a four-hour test time.”
“I know. Normally that is possible but we are understaffed today, the sn—”
“I understand there may need to be an extra fee for expediting the result. Needless to say I will be happy to pay it.” Patty smiles.
“I see.” Roberta nods. “Four hours. And the expedited rate is an extra fifty percent.” She smiles a snake-like smile.
“I’ll come back for the result.”
She begins to retrace her steps to the cafe, following the breadcrumbs of memory, but finds a modern coffee shop open on the way. It’s a corpo-chain shop but all the better for anonymity. Plus it offers bagel and baguette breakfasts, as well as superskinnysoymoccacinolattes. Patty orders and pays. The staff do not make eye contact, they have no interest in her life story, why she is there, what she wants. Perfect. She sits and closes her eyes. Immediately tiredness sweeps over her. She’s exhausted but must not sleep. Soon she will be able to. Then she can catch up on more than twenty years of sleep. She sips her coffee and feels her mind slip back twenty years—that last Christmas won’t stay out of her thoughts.
“Dad.” Dani hugs him tight. Father and daughter seem to become a single being for a few seconds, and then release.
“I’ll take your bag in.” He lifts the backpack over a shoulder and walks it inside.
“Mum.” Dani embraces Patty, but it doesn’t have the same warmth or urgency. Patty can’t help but feel that old jealousy. They break their embrace, or is it that Dani tries to break free but Patty holds on? She looks her daughter in the face. Dani looks tired around the eyes and her face is fuller. Patty can tell her daughter has completely given up on training, less lean than she has been for years, even a little tummy forming. Student diet is a killer.
“I am so looking forward to bread sauce,” Dani says with a huge grin. She firmly twists from her mother’s grip and heads inside.
“Do you remember this?” Dani holds up the treasure she has unearthed.
“Do I?” says Patty, laughing. “That’s Hoppy Bunny. I bought her for you when I was pregnant. I’d only just found out. We were living in Clapham and I went to Arding and Hobbs. Three shillings she was.” Patty smiles, thinking she’s finally connecting with her daughter, that whatever is going on with Dani will come out. Instead, she watches a cloud sweep across her daughter’s face as she closes off once more. Patty watches her go through the old boxes for a while longer and then leaves her to get on with it. In the kitchen she makes coffee and wonders for the millionth time what is up with her. She’d been home two days and was so morose. Even Tom and Izzy coming over hadn’t cheered her up. Patty lights a cigarette, opens a window a crack and blows the smoke out.
She remembers the absolute joy she had felt when she bought Hoppy, her first real acknowledgment that a life was growing inside her. And she can remember so clearly how Dani’s eyes had lit up the first time she saw it and how she squirmed as Patty bounced the bunny on her tummy.
“Hoppy loves Dani, hop, hop, hop.”
As a child Dani had loved her mother best of all but the older
she got the closer she and Jim became, until one day Patty felt an outsider in her own family. Maybe it was puberty; the teen years were tough. She finishes the cigarette and flicks the butt out of the open window, staring out into …
“Mum.”
“Christ.” Patty jumps at her daughter’s voice. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I’m not going back to uni. A year—”
“Don’t be stupid.”
And the row strikes like a tsunami.
“It’s Christmas Eve,” Jim pleads with them, but he knows it’s futile. They’re both too stubborn to back down now.
“I’m going.” Dani is adamant.
“Stay till after Christmas Day at least,” he asks.
“Let her go. She can think about how stupid she’s being,” Patty almost spits.
“Don’t worry, I’m not staying here.”
“Dani, please, sweethe—”
“I’m sorry, Dad. Bye.”
There was no goodbye for Patty.
That was the last time they saw her.
Alive.
INTERMISSION THREE
Tuesday, February 14, 1984
Dani and Tom sit back-to-back, leaning against each other. He has the cigarette, takes an amateur pull on it, does not inhale and passes it back to her. She takes it from him like a precious relic and in a gracious sweep brings it to her mouth. She drags the smoke deep into her lungs, holds it there and then, with a practiced pucker, releases a perfect smoke ring. It sails away, slowly breaking down until it dissolves. She wonders if she could blow a smoke ring over an erect penis. She takes another deep draw on the cigarette and aims at an imaginary erection.
“Good smoke ring,” Tom says looking round. She doesn’t tell him what she was aiming at.
He casually drops his eyes to his watch. “I think we need to get back, Dani.” He stands, making sure she doesn’t tip backward.
She looks down at the cigarette, knowing he’s right but feeling resentful. Geography and chemistry will never be as useful to her, in real-life situations, as being able to smoke with style. She imagines she’s Julie Christie as she takes the cigarette up to her mouth and draws softly but intensely on the tip, the end glowing powerfully red. She rolls the smoke around her mouth like she’s seen her dad do with wine, then pushes the smoke out through her nose, a perfect dragon drag. Satisfied, she flicks the butt into the corner. It bounces underneath the spare pommel horse.
Inside their corrugated metal smokehouse it was dry, but outside the air is damp—as close to rain as you can get without it actually raining. Both feel their hair start to curl slightly at the ends and their school uniforms dampen. They walk back to the main building in an uneasy silence. He’s dying for her to mention the card—the one he delivered to her house at five o’clock that morning. He hadn’t signed it, of course, but desperately wanted to hear about it from her. Was she excited? Who could her mysterious admirer be? How did she feel about what was inside the card—a ticket for Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Apollo the following week. E4, upper circle.
Dani was thinking about the card. Of course she knew it was from Tom, just like she knew he had the ticket next to hers. If he’d said, “Let’s go see the Banshees,” she would have gone, probably would have let him buy her ticket. But this romantic bullshit made her feel uneasy. She should never have kissed him. He’d caught her a little upset, more than a little drunk, on the rebound and easy prey. It had been stupid. She didn’t want to lose him, he was her best friend, but she’d let him imagine something he couldn’t have. He wasn’t someone she could have fun with—at least, not just fun. With the athletes and sporty-boys it was easier; they didn’t ask any searching questions and had no real feelings to hurt. She could talk to Tom; they both had issues with their mothers and had dreams of the future. Tom was cool … but not cool enough. Not for a boyfriend. And he wasn’t sexy, and Dani was starting to appreciate sexy.
“Are you training later?” he asks. She doesn’t respond right away. The answer’s “no,” but that didn’t mean she was free to hang out. Instead, she was going to take the Tube into town and mooch around the pub opposite Goldsmiths in the hope that she’d see him again. She knew very little about him; they called him Bix and he did something with Lego and dog shit. He was tall and arrogantly, jaw-droppingly handsome. He was a friend of Toni’s brother and they had all met up on Saturday. Bix hadn’t talked to Dani directly, but she’d watched him as he dominated the group, talking with passion about art and sculpture as he drank cider and smoked his short, stubby roll-ups, which he made look fucking sexy. In part, this was why she was smoking at lunchtime—to get good enough to smoke with him. The other part was that she wanted to get stoned very soon, and knew you had to be a smoker or it didn’t work.
“Yes, I’m training. My sprinting needs some work,” she says into the air, not catching his eye. She hates lying to Tom. If it had been anything else she’d have told him. In the last year he’d become her closest friend, even listening as she droned on about her mum and bloody Greenham Common. Not even her dad was so attentive, but she knows Tom wants boyfriend/girlfriend. No matter how selfish her mum says she is, she will not screw Tom over and make him listen to her moaning about love stuff.
“We could get together after training.”
“No. No idea how long I’ll be.” She keeps her eyes ahead, trying not to blush at the lie.
He nods like he agrees, but feels disappointed. He had wanted this to be their first Valentine’s together. They carry on, walking in silence, until the school gates come into view.
“The careers fair is on Friday. Ha—”
She groans. “God, Tom, I have no idea what I want to be when I’m a grown-up. Not dead and not a journalist, that’s about it.”
“Okay,” he says, trying to sound upbeat.
They reach the school gates and push inside. This is where they part. He knows she’s off to geography. He has her timetable memorized.
“Tomorrow, seven thirty at the bus stop?” she asks.
He nods. She squeezes his arm and walks off. He watches her cross the playground. His stomach tightens when she finally disappears. He knows something is happening, changing. Over the last six months he’s seen how she’s slipped out of her training regime, started to wear make-up and think about what she’s wearing, but he doesn’t know what it means. In his pocket the Siouxsie and the Banshees ticket burns a hole. They often spend their evenings together, sometimes studying but mostly just talking, but there is nothing about these evenings that could be called “romantic” and he wants a real date. He can still feel the adrenaline of their kiss, even after more than two weeks. It’s like some super battery, revving him up. He wants more, wants everything. He wants Dani. From inside the closest building he can hear the bell ring. He runs to class.
THIRTEEN
Saturday, December 18, 2010
“Maybe we should go to her house,” Dani suggests.
Jim shakes his head. “If she was there she’d answer the phone.”
“Unless …” Dani realizes her mistake and stops. Jim switches the radio on and they listen, but can only bear it for a few minutes. Everything is closed, cut off, trapped, lost, buried, worst since records began. The end is nigh. He’s called Patty five times over the last few hours, and of course he’s imagined her lying on the floor unconscious but … deep down he knows his fear isn’t really about Patty being hurt.
“I need to get in touch. Tom might …” But he’s afraid to call Tom. For some reason he needs to talk to Patty first. And …
“The Lost Soul.” He suddenly realizes there is someone who might know where Patty is, or at least have a mobile phone number for her. Jim runs upstairs.
“Dad?” Dani calls after him.
“I’ll be down in a minute.”
He stands before her door. He hasn’t been in there since the day she left. He puts his hand to the door and … push. A rush of stagnant air, the slight sweetness of damp hits him. The ro
om is empty. The wall is gone. The pictures and endless reports, the questions—all gone. The desk is empty but he hopes he’ll find a leaflet in the drawer. Yes.
“But it’s miles, Dad.”
“I can do it. I know the short cuts.”
“But she might not even be there.”
“I know, but I have to do something.” Jim smiles at Dani and heads out. He knows she’s right, it’s a long way and the news says there’s no trains or buses—but it’s the only thing he can think to do. He’s tried calling but just gets an answering machine. He has to try to see Karan Noble. As he walks, he tries to remember Karan’s story.
Karan Noble had twin girls, Emma and Tamsin. At the age of eleven they disappeared. It was 1976, the hottest summer for decades, and the girls had been playing in the garden in an inflatable paddling pool they’d been given for their birthday. Karan had called them in for dinner at about six o’clock and there was no reply. No girls. Nobody was sure when they could remember seeing them last. There was lots of media interest initially, pretty girl twins, photogenic and newspaper-selling. But that died away as the reporters came up against a brick wall with the family. Karan shut herself away from the world and left it all to the husband who was a cold fish. With little media attention, the police found the trail quickly became cold. With no prodding from the family, it just all dropped. It was a mystery for seven years. Then, an accident in their street led the gas board to dig up most of the road and some gardens behind the houses. The twins’ bodies were found in the garden of Karan’s next-door neighbors, Ken and Sarah. For Karan, who had almost got her life back together, it was like losing them all over again. Maybe worse—now she knew there was no hope. And she had trusted Ken. He had been the first person she had called when she found the girls missing. He had led the search around the neighborhood.
